So, Ripped Denim is Back

I left work Monday on foot, walking towards the eBike I had reserved on my phone. The app that lets you pay for eBikes also shows you all the available ones to rent nearby, and you can put a hold on one for 30 minutes in advance. As I walked down Peachtree from work to my reserved ride I stopped, as I often do, to see what the custom couture shop near the library has in their window. One of the windows was full of artfully cut and torn denim. I had a moment to remember an old MTSU Professor, one of the editors of the Journal of Pop Culture, talking about torn denim in fashion decades ago. "It projects the image of a neglected child" she had said. Of course torn denim is back. People pay a lot of money to project poverty, patched and mixed textures in their clothes, on purpose. I remember thinking even when I was young how dumb it was. I grew up poor, and I have kind of a thing about dressing in clothes that look nice.

As I continued on to my reserved bike, I was sad to find that the first reserved selection had bent wheels and a smashed seat. The next bike was so damaged it couldn't be scanned. The third bike I found on the edge of Woodruff Park was rideable, but the bells had been broken and someone had twisted the left hand break a weird way. I was still able to use the third bike to ride to the grocery, and then home.

I know it was likely one of my unhoused neighbors breaking all the rental eBikes out of frustration. I would be frustrated too, if I were unhoused in Atlanta with all the vacant business tower space just sitting there around me.

One morning during the quarantine phase of pandemic as the husband drove me into work, we watched EMS workers collect the body of a homeless person off the side of Atlanta Medical Center. The unhoused neighbor had died on the sidewalk outside the hospital overnight. This did not make the news. It happens all the time. Now that same hospital is closing because it could not make a profit of any kind, but lost money year after year. Too many people needed help. I don't blame the hospital. I don't blame the person who got angry and went around breaking all the bikes. But we did use that hospital, and I do need the bikes to get home after work, so I wish things were different.

Sometimes I think about the fact that I had a life for about ten years where I mostly wasn't scraping by all the time. There was about a decade where I didn't feel fucking poor, and I thought, hey, I'll never have to be poor again. Then this thing happened that happened to everybody, where the federal government was gutted first, and then a million people died, some of them right out on the street.

Most people didn't see it. Most people in Atlanta still don't know that there were refrigerated trucks beside the stadium for the bodies. I know there are people in the suburbs who still think it was a hoax, because it wasn't in their face.

A friend of mine is using crowfunding for medical expenses now, because even if you are employed with health insurance, most of us don't have enough. I fantasize about finding a way to steal or scam enough to fix all of my loved one's medical bills. I try not to scream when the husband reminds me how much better we have it than the single parents he sees in his work every day, living in rental conditions that in any sane state would be illegal.

We don't live in a sane state. All I can do is get up every morning and go to a job that pays less than I could make anywhere else. I go to this job because I think I am making a difference. If I don't get up and do something every day to make living in this country, this state, and this city less difficult, I think I'll lose my mind. I'll start screaming and shredding my denim pants, because I want to project that we are all the neglected children of a state that lets people die in the street. I worry that by working the job that keeps me from screaming - the job that pays so much less than I could be making elsewhere - that I am damaging and neglecting my own children.

I tell myself that of course, the money isn't what matters, having the time off and holidays this job allows me will fill in the gaps left by the lack of money. I have less than twenty months now with both my kids in High School, and I want to maximize my time with them. We can't afford artfully ripped denim. We can't even afford invisilines to correct their slightly crooked teeth, teeth that on one child were *so close* to being straight until the pandemic hit and she outgrew her invisilines and we've not been able to replace them. But at least we aren't on the street, breaking bikes out of frustration, or dying on the side of a hospital for lack of care. I can make sure my children's clothes don't have holes in them. It's 2022, the world is on fire, and we're all just doing our best.